While Tovaras isn't as famous as Xeno he's definitely a really good war and he knows what he's talking about.
No offence to Xeno, since he does make decent (albeit very long sometimes) guides and raid vids but he's like not World #1 WAR or anything to the point where his views are Word of God.
The issues people are finding with WAR are coming from those who also know how to play the job at a high level so to dismiss their collective views because you haven't seen Xeno making a video about it only makes you lot appear as stupid sheep.
Ah...you guys talking about that xeno guy? well, I firmly believe that Pld went in deep hell during HW is due HIS goddamn aggressive tanking video guide! If he express concern? deal with it!
But can we please get back on task again and have a MEANINGFUL discussion on Warrior's current problems? It's concept is an offensive oriented tank. But in it's 4.0 execution it absolutely flops at that. Please contribute instead of going off on tangents about how a specific player isn't opening his mouth.
While I think the doomsaying is getting to a little extreme point from all parts of the forums, including tank, DPS and healers, (really, the only ones that I think have all the reason to cry and call themselves dead are WHMs), all the concerned WARs do have a point when they worry about WAR's lack of utility. They're going from the tank with the most -actually useful- utility from being the one that has the least utility, and that can be troublesome.
In a way, I understand the removal of Delirium, Halone and Storm's Path debuffs, since those (particularly Delirium and Path) amounted to what basically was a permanent Virus+Disable combo. Adding the old Reprisal to the mix was a combination that PLD simply had absolutely no answer to since Divine Veil had to be planned much like a healer barrier, and the long CD made it simply much less convenient than the permanent application of the other two. I guess they're trying to cement PLD's identity as the wall tank by only giving them the mitigation CDs, so I think it was a step in the right direction to take that particular approach.
However... leaving WAR with absolutely nothing to compete with Divine Veil, Passage and Blackest Night does seem like an imbalance :/. It didn't even have to be as powerful as the old Path, really, and a different kind of defensive utility, whether as part of a combo or in an oGCD, could have been a good answer. Ideas that I can think of are possibly sharing a portion of the Thrill of Battle flavor with the party (increasing and healing maximum HP), increasing Defense and Magic Defense (akin to Protect), or simply inflicting the boss with a minor damage down for 5 or 6 seconds, allowing WAR to chose not to take Reprisal, or take it to have two different raid-wide mitigation tools.
That said, I'm afraid if this was the case, DRK would need a similar tool or they would be the ones shunned from progression raiding, and the problem would boil back down to what the problem was in HW: the two tanks that deal the most DPS would be the ones taken for everything, since they'd all have more or less the same mitigation tools.
I personally think we have to see the mitigation requirements from the new raid tiers first. If PLD's raidwide mitigation is absolutely necessary, I think we'll have a very obvious balancing problem. If not, it will all boil down to personal DPS in the end anyways, since their single target mitigation skills (Intervention, Cover and Blackest Night) might come as unnecessary seeing the amount of mitigation AST and SCH can give, plus the choice of taking Apocatastasis and Palisade for DPS roles.
I say it's still a little bit too early to say if PLD will outDPS both DRK and WAR, at least I personally think PLD shouldn't, but I haven't done extensive maths to say so for sure. If that does happen to be the case, however, the situation is indeed worrying. Perhaps not as worrying as the AST vs WHM case, but worrying nonetheless.
I think the cost itself is reasonable given PLD gives up 300-516 potency to self-heal and WAR gives up nothing to do so. Every stance swap is also about a self-heal lost in addition to half their gauge.
The real concern with tank balance imo is DRK. The vulnerability up and lack of that kind of mechanic plus a general shortage of defensive buffs means either they're going to be way undertuned or overtuned depending on the contents and how much tank damage gets nerfed as a fraction of party damage.
He never said that WAR is DOA though. Maybe you should actually read the topic and see the points that's being raised. Or should we wait until Xeno makes a video about it first?
I'll go over what you said in the original post and give you my thoughts on it.
I don't mean any offense, I'm just honouring this post as a prompt for an exchange of views.
Onslaught
You're right, right now there is no point in using Onslaught ever since the damage isn't worth the cost and we are very likely to have even less enmity issues than Heavensward to begin with.
Upheaval
Upheaval is, in my opinion, what makes the job not braindead easy compared to Heavensward. Upheaval is a better use for your gauge than Fell Cleave outside berserk, which makes you want to strategize around using it as close to on cooldown as possible while still entering zerk with 100 gauge.
If we were not punished for using it, we'd just drop Fell Cleave and use Upheaval 24/7. The only other possible case where I'd see it working well would be it having the exact same value per gauge point as Fell Cleave, but that'd be a bit simplistic and wouldn't make the job more interesting at all, it would just add one more button to press.
Shake it off
For what the game is now, it is almost useless outside of PvP, but who knows? Pretty much agree with you on this one, but can't say anything before savage Omega actually comes out.
Inner Release
Just a great ability that makes the job interesting, designed mainly to lengthen the rotation from 90s to 120s just like most job and raid buff rotations.
Warrior's party utility
There's two "stages" of raiding, if that makes sense: progress and farming.
During progress, Path was kinda cool I guess but not a needed thing, and not having it encourages the team to work better with their cooldowns instead of relying on an ace up their sleeve that's always available basically for free. Once farming starts, Path becomes pretty much useless since it starts giving diminishing returns when the whole fight is planned and known inside out.
Storm's Eye is still coming from warrior and it's even more reliable than ever, but now we're given the chance to experiment DRK PLD comps in a non-optimized environment where meta has no relevance at all.
While it is true that the job doesn't get anything in return for that "utility loss", as small a loss as it may be in truth, you must remember that in terms of aggro generation in the opener and cooldown availability warrior is still hands down the best by a mile: for that reason, warrior still does have a solid spot in any comp for increased raid damage due to better aggro and mitigation.
Why is WAR the best for opener aggro? Because butcher's block has slightly higher potency than eye and path, and is used in berserk in the opener, alongside Equilibrium, Thrill if not needed soon and several fell cleaves in zerk which just generate decent aggro from raw damage. Also, warrior doesn't need tank stance for any more than a single tomahawk to generate enough enmity for any raid comp, even in speedkills.
Why is WAR the best for cooldown availability? Holmgang is a 3min cooldown compared to 5min LD and 7min HG, and Thrill, Vengeance and Raw Intuition all have incredibly fast recast times. Also, Vengeance is Vengeance.
Thing is, mistakes shouldn't be taken into account because they're mistakes, and they're what you are learning to overcome in a fight, you don't want to put a band-aid on them to just recover while repeating them. Party utility is not what helps a team survive mistakes, it's what helps them synergise together to all deal the most damage while surviving.
Overall damage
Here, I just think you have really bad reasoning.
Warrior is still the offensive machine, and Berserk got a nice buff since you're effectively gaining one berserk cast every 2, that's +50% recast speed for -40% effectiveness. And Warrior is based on immediate bursts of damage so concentrating those bursts one more time every 3 minutes is even more value than just what the numbers show.
Also, you are comparing jobs through max potencies, which is just plain wrong: WAR has a 500 potency skill which is cast once every 12 seconds on average (10 times in 2 minutes), and that's just because out of berserk you'll be using Upheaval instead, so that's another ~3 Upheavals (300 potency) every 2 minutes.
Now, a special note about PLD: as the game is currently, PLD is indeed the highest potency per rotation so if the game were to be released as we've seen it PLD would indeed be the highest dps among tanks. It is unlikely that it will be like that or that it will stay like that for long, but that's what we have now. And yet, what I think is off here is not Warrior being weak, rather than PLD being a bit too high up on potencies.
Anyway, I don't see warrior being discarded for its "low damage" unless we're talking speedkills and PLD stays as it is now, in which case the meta will definitely be double PLD: my point is, it's not about warrior lacking something from the others, it's about PLD being in a weird spot atm. DRK is still at about the same damage as WAR like in Heavensward, not much to say about that.
Stance dancing
Agreed, being punished for stance dancing is stupid.
But I don't see it being as bad as you say, and here's why: if you have to change stance in a fight, it's a major fuckup from someone and your dps is not going to be good anyway, so there's no point in fretting over losing some dps. You can just spend your points with cleave and provoke>onslaught and swap to keep the boss while the other tank recovers. If you know that fight, you won't even need defiance at all for emergency.
Again, I do think halving your gauge to swap sucks, I'm just saying I don't think it will matter as much if you play well.
Conclusion
Your whole conclusion is based on a very sloppy idea of playing warrior, where you don't know when or if you will be changing stance and you still want to strategise over it.
Warrior hasn't been made more convoluted in my opinion, it was aboslutely braindead in Heavensward (fit 3 cleaves and fracture in zerk, use fracture and heavy swing at 5 stacks if you can, use as many zerks per fight as possible) and now it requires some planning to make the most out of Fell Cleave, Upheaval and 原初の解放 (Inner Release or whatever it's called in english).
From what we know now, I'm looking at a more entertaining job than ever, that will likely still be really good in raids even though there are some minor problems that could leave it somewhat hindered during very early progress, which is a really short phase anyway.
Let's all wait for release and see for ourselves, then we'll be able to get upset or happy about things.
お楽しみに~
Onslaught ought to be free period. No rage cost pls! Take off the damage. Make it pure utility like stuns.
Dismissing or co-signing an argument because of the person behind it - rather than the actual merit of the point itself - is being a sheep. If you're not educated enough on WAR to agree or disagree with the topic then that's one thing, but to be like 'Oh Xeno hasn't said anything yet so you're wrong OP, your view doesn't matter' deems anything you have to say irrelevant.
Been playing war since 1.0 all the way until now..its being what 6 years?,
I will keep being a war until lv 70 an will take a decision from there.
But the identity of the war is very weird right now, they took a lot of skills from us that we have since very early levels,
Bloodbath, mercy stroke since MRD class an others like flash from GLA...
I feel rubbed but I'm going to hold back until I see it myself but fell Cleves was not the only fun action of the war,
Path,mantra stance dancing selfsustain an fell cleves..but now it feels off the original class.
Instead of onslaught or whatever the skill is call(shoulder tackle for me) instead of using rage to start using MP same with stance dancing give us some use for MP(or give us our freedom back) since we don't have flash anymore an give at least bloodbath or storm path effect back, they change on the class is too much to take in , we lose so much utility an skills that are useful to us since day 1.
It seems to me that SE is taking great pains to disincentivize stance-dancing on tanks. It definitely feelsbadman, I get that. Do they just hate it? Maybe. But, I think it's more likely that SB content is going to push MT's into tank stance way more often. Looking at the kits and whatnot, it seems like SE is turning tank stance and DPS stance into modes for MT and OT, not modes to swap into or out of as you are actively MT'ing the boss.
Will the optimized play work out that way? I'm eager to see.
Unless the new raid encounters have ridiculously high damage going on tanks, which I highly doubt considering the expansion theme seems to revolve around making the game simpler and easier, tanks in good groups will just stay in dps stance all the time, doing tank swaps and using aggro manipulation tools to take care of both mitigation and aggro. Sure the devs can make a raid that requires good tanks to stay in tank stance, but then we'll end up with another gordias tier and people will complain that it's too hard. Right now those good tanks who stay out of tank stance all the time probably still mitigate better and require less heals than average tanks who stay in tank stance most of the time, thanks to well coordinated heals/mitigations/swaps as well as high group dps allowing them to skip some mechanics/busters. If they need tank stance to clear, average groups won't stand a chance. Then you need to consider overgearing. Raids are designed to be cleared in gears 20+ ilv below the loots they give you, so you'll always gain more dps/hp/def after you clear, which will inevitably give you more freedom to stance dance (and healers will inevitably have more healing downtime which they can fill with dps spells).
Wars will go to defiance when necessary, though the threshold required to make us do so will be higher than in 3.x or even 2.x.
I've main war since 2.0 launch and even tested it a bit in beta and going into 4.0 puts us in a weird situation. Onslaught I agree is quite niche for the cost it requires. Upheaval is a decent off-gcd for the same cost as Onslaught. Shake it off is nice to have, especially in PvP, though content design will determine its utility. Inner Release looks like a great ability on paper and the amount of immunity it provides is really good and the trait for Infuriate cd reduction is only a good thing. However, you can't Infuriate outside of battles, we lost bloodbath, brutal swing and even though you can block and parry from behind in 4.0 why does Raw Intuition still crit from behind.
I only really have issues with two skills but here's a couple of options to improve their viability among other QoL things.
Defiance/Deliverance
-Costs 25 beast gauge. 10 second recast.
Berserk
- Additionally restores 20% of damage dealt as hp. Duration and recast unchanged.
- Increase Berserk to 40% increase in Attack Power. Duration and recast unchanged. (Highly controversial but just throwing it out there)
- Increase direct critical hit rate by 10%. Duration and recast unchanged.
Storm's Path, Storm's Eye, Butcher's Block
- All give 20 Beast gauge. Storm's Path heals for 100% of damage dealt. (much needed imo)
Infuriate trait
- Inner Beast, Steel Cyclone, Fell Cleave, Decimate, Onslaught, Upheaval reduces Infuriate recast timer by 5 seconds upon using the action/skill. (Much needed QoL)
Onslaught
1. Give Onslaught a stun, duration 3 seconds. 20 Gauge.
2. Increase potency to 200. 20 Gauge..
3. Reduce cost to 10 Beast gauge. Potency and cd unchanged.
Upheaval
1. Give Upheaval a stun. Gauge is unchanged.
2. Upheaval gains a 100% Direct Critical Hit at 100% hp. Gauge is unchanged. (I would love this)
3. Upheaval puts a DoT for 18 seconds. Potency 20. Potency unchanged.
4. Gain "Hungry Beast" buff. 20% of damage dealt is converted into HP. 10 seconds. Gauge and potency is unchanged.
Atm WAR's theme is of this "reckless abandon, angry berserk tank" but some of the skills hold that back with the high cost of beast gauge. I'm still excited for war in 4.0 but it still needs a few more touch ups, specifically stance switching costs, increasing all combo finishers to 20 gauge, Infuriate trait fix and the viability of Onslaught in PvE. Also I'm sure the OP hasn't seen any of the tool tips but WAR still is the only tank with a Slashing debuff.
MTQ Tool Tip video
4.0 Embargo Skill changes
That was only half of the equation. In any event, dismissing random uninformed opinions on favor of ones developed by yourself or by a trusted figure is not being a sheep. Seeing as how none of the people in this thread have raided a couple months from now, no opinions formed currently can be reliable in the first place.
I'm getting tired of this. Yes, you can form reliable opinions, theories, rotations, openers based on the data we know so far. Potencies can change, yes, so are our opinions, theories, rotations, openers. But unless they do some major rework on our core mechanics or change the potencies in a very extreme way, most of the arguments here about stance dancing cost wouldn't change much, if they even do. A lot of the great players have done some theorycrafting on their jobs. Xeno came up with the straightforward berserk rotation with 6 cleaves and a path combo and an upheaval. Thendiel came up with a new drg opener as well as theories about aligning 2nd bfb with the red botd. Aiurily did something similar with brd/mch, Laqi did it for blm/smn, and I believe many other that I don't know/remember have done so. Yes the devs can change potencies and some effects, then we can adjust the rotations too. It's not like they're gonna turn these jobs into completely different things, scrapping everything they showed in the live letter.
The point is to have all 3 combos in rotation. As it is currently Storm's Path has priority over all other combos because it give 20 gauge not to mention the self heal, since we lost Bloodbath, will most likely be more important now than ever. If all three combo finishers give 20 gauge then there is more flexibility in the rotation instead of SE combo once then SP combo till slashing/SE debuff refresh. Having an enmity, heal and slashing buff combo all give 30 gauge all together can only be a good thing for WAR.
The whole point is storm's path is your dps combo, storm's eye is your utility combo and BB is your aggro combo. You're meant to only use storm's eye to keep your damage up buff on, path is the one you spam thanks to extra beast gauge and BB is only if you need enmity.
This is the same setup as PLD with royal authority as dps, goring blade as utility and rage of halone for aggro. DRK is similar with souleater for dps and powerslash for enmity, but DRK has no utility combo.
Masterfully put Liyonn on the surface some of those skill seems cool but when you think of price you have to pay for them it just not worth the cost of a fell cleave. It insane to me that you have pay for stance dance >:(
I have to agree with OP. WAR lost all its utility, and for what? Slightly increased DPS? A 60s Esuna and a gapcloser? Not worth it at all. Now WAR is the most selfish tank, and unless it gets some huge potency changes it's not even going to bring the DPS to make up for it. HW WAR brought something to every group, no matter what the composition was. It worked with every other job and didn't conflict with any of them, unlike PLD vs DRK (or how DRK took MNK's only utility). Sure, SB WAR doesn't look like it conflicts with any other job either, but it also gives them absolutely nothing. NIN/SAM provide their own slashing debuff, and WAR can't reduce damage on anyone but itself. Plus Unchained sharing a cooldown with Inner Release and the gauge loss on stance swapping makes WAR want to tank even less, which is just stupid.
Man I really want to use some of these abilities but when I think about the cost it puts on the beast gauge I'm thinking do I really want to not inner beast or fell cleave right now. Like Why does my shoulder tackle cost beast gauge
or you make storm path is the best dps combo or ppl go to delete of they cross bars, ppl already try to avoid path every time they can, if you think ppl go to use it for a misery self heal you are complety wrong, now if you need agro you use butcher, thanks to this system we dont go to have to dealt with those warrios using buthcher as they dps rotation on OT, and if you are MT you go to use all of then per equal.
and well we dont have the final numbers yet, but the speed as war generate gauge with the current numbers is pretty fine 20-30 points per combo its the same as the current stack system.
Sorry i mean fixed by moving 2nd move for dps combo from Savage blade to riot
Your post is oozing with big indicators that you don't really understand how the job works when played efficiently, and I'll explain why it looks like a really distasteful beg for inappropriate buffs.
Stance Dance costing 25 IB
I don't even understand if you want or don't want to stance dance with this proposal. This is bad for both sides, since 25 is a lower cost than what it could be now but it's also higher than it could be, so you can just spend points and then swap. What is this "change" trying to accomplish?
Berserk
Basically, you're taking a steroid that was buffed from heavensward to stormblood, and you're just asking for more, pointless buffs.
They removed Bloodbath and you're asking them to tie the same effect to Berserk.
You're asking for a flat 33% increase in damage.
You're asking for both critical and direct hit rate to be raised by 10% for the whole duration.
If you don't understand how wrong it is, I don't see how you could expect to be taken seriously.
All combo finishers giving 20 IB
If all combo finishers were to give the same amount of IB, Path would be abandoned.
The 20 IB gain is the point for you to use Path.
Butcher draws enmity and eye is required to be up constantly for the damage dealt buff, while Path allows you to use more Cleaves and Upheavals, but you can't just spam that because you need to keep the Eye buff up, and if you're tanking the boss you need to keep aggro every once in a while.
Onslaught and Upheaval reduce the Infuriate cd like the IB weaponskills
Again, really bad suggestion. the way it is now, you are on the edge of fitting an extra infuriate maybe every 2 minute, but you are just downright asking for free infuriates shamelessly.
Onslaught
Stun? You can just Onslaught Low Blow if you really so desire, you don't have many oGCDs to use anyway.
Potency to 200 would probably make a bit more sense but it'd just be a button to press. You point is fair here, but not really adding much to the job.
10 IB would be a nice change, but it would require the enmity to be removed since it'd be used for dps due to its IB-to-potency value (20 per point, higher than Upheaval's 15 and Cleave's 10), effectively making it a stronger Plunge.
Upheaval
Again, you do have Low Blow. Read your tooltips before jumping to conclusions.
100% direct crit? seriously? This is literally asking for free damage with no drawbacks, since WAR can pretty much just swap for 10s to get a tankbuster and swap out to use that again. There is no value to "just more damage", it's just begging.
They remove a DoT, and you ask for them to tie it in to an ability that already has a point to be used instead of Fell Cleave. Again, begging for damage without a real purpose.
And yet again, Bloodbath is gone. There's better ways to cope with it than repeat a million times that you miss it in a forum thread.
From your conclusion, what you are failing to recognize of the warrior is that it's not an "angry berserker that deals the damage you always dreamt of", it's a berserker that has to keep juggling on the frail line between anger and calmness. That means you're not just going all out and doing damage left and right, you have to keep a hold of your Inner Beast and use it to your advantage without abusing it: that's why I think now, more than ever, warrior truly reflects what it should be.
Bloodbath is not as crucial as you make it out to be. If you are relying on self-heals to stay alive, you are doing it wrong. You should think of self-heals not as a way to survive, but as a way to ease the job on healers during intense sections of fights such as A12S pulling or A11S, when you get vuln up stacks to keep damaging the boss.
Having all combos give the same IB would make Path disappear forever, I can assure you there is absolutely no doubt about that.
Take this reply not as an intent to offend you, rather than as a way to point you toward the really important aspects of the Warrior job.
I don't think anyone of us would mind that though now that the utility of path is gone it might aswell go away for all I care at last. :|
They did took useful skills from us so why leave us with that piece of garbage?
And no it's not more engaging or challenging either. It's just one more nuisance that adds nothing utility wise.
It gives you a reason to use Eye > Path > Eye > Path when offtanking instead of incorporating your enmity combo while offtanking for the increased damage which has been an issue through 3.x. Once a group outgeared content, there was no reason to use Path ever (barring enmity concerns).
but they took the only real reason to use path wish was to add -10% debuff raid damage
Yes but after you overgeared content the -10% debuff was pointless and there was no reason to use path unless you were about to rip enmity off the main tank. Path was good in progression. When everyone knew a fight, it wasn't all that great. Now it has a use all the time.
Are you suggesting that WAR OTs should be alternating Eye+Block combos in 3.x? Because that is an overall raid potency loss compared to just spamming Eye combos.
My concerns about WAR at this point are in the numbers; potencies aren't final, so I'm reserving full judgment for now. The stance dancing bit is annoying, but is just going to change how WAR has to play in response to incoming damage: lead into the buster with Defiance, as opposed to sitting in Deliverance until right before you use Inner Beast.
Please bear with my compulsive need for lengthy and orderly posts.
Let's analyse Path with care, in light of the two stages of raiding that we call progress and farming:
HEAVENSWARD
In Heavensward, the only reason you would ever use Path is the -10% damage dealt debuff on the target.
During progress, Path is on the surface a really cool tool to clear fights with minimal losses, but what I see it as is an ace that is always up your sleeve, and that you have no reason to use if nobody is making any mistakes. This kind of tool is nothing but a hindrance to the group's improvement in both strategy and dps output, as it allows people to make really bad mistakes and still recover swiftly without being punished as much as they should. This is bad for the group, not good. Shouldn't your aim be to become a better player?
During farming, Path is reduced to a major fuckup plan B, and again acts as an ace up your sleeve and doesn't really punish you. Since you have been led to rely on Path to clear fights, you will now see it as a necessary tool to clear, which means you'll be hindering your potential and failing to recognize that you are not improving but relying on it. Don't be mistaken, Path helps you clear but is bad for you in its current state.
STORMBLOOD
Path will no longer apply the damage down debuff. What does that mean? Well, if you are wont to relying on it you will have a bit more trouble clearing the fights initially, but in truth this is only a good riddance.
Not relying on Path anymore, you will be prompted to work around limited time cooldowns and general movement optimization to survive and deal damage at your best. This will make you a much better player, trust me.
During progress, you will not know what damage to expect in what phases which will require intelligent organization and safe play until you are well-acquaintanced with the phase you are dealing with, and fuckups will be more punishing, which leads to more constructive thinking rather than sloppy clears.
During farming, instead of having a combo finisher sitting there until a really bad fuckup comes around, you will have a useful tool to build more damage that constantly helps you keep your dps up. Dps helps you clear a fight a million times more than a damage down debuff.
I am looking forward to this Path and I deem it infinitely better than it was before, and I hope you're convinced too at this point.
I don't think you'll convince many people that slightly faster gauge generation is worth the loss of all of WAR's utility. Reducing one tank to purely contributing DPS while doubling up on PLD's raidwide mitigation and giving DRK a decently spammable shield isn't how you make them balanced, especially when it seems like WAR won't have significantly higher DPS (if the potencies even get changed to make it beat PLD). Using Path in place of BB or Eye was only a small DPS loss anyway, and not one that's going to make your group miss a DPS check or hit enrage.
You can say that learning without mitigation abilities like Path will help your group, but as long as the other tanks have those kinds of abilities they'll be the better choice.
I'm sorry, what? Storm's Path in its current state is arguably the primary reason to take a Warrior into progression scenarios. Even in the current tier, one of the easiest and most lightly tuned on record, it served a strong purpose to smooth out damage curves and mitigate huge AoE spikes such as the Mega Holy following Stasis into Sacrament in A12S.
Further, the ability saw ample usage in farm. Storm's Path was integral to maintaining high raid DPS - maximum Deliverance and Cleric Stance uptime - with a Warrior tanking the General's Might in A12S adds phase. It also could be used to supplement other raid mitigation tools to allow a tank to use one fewer cooldown in a mitigation stack or to net a healer a damaging GCD.
It's not a crutch tool. It's one you need to learn how to use properly by analyzing the 20 potency trade you make as a Warrior with some other potency gain from another job.
You clearly don't understand what Storm's Path in its current form is capable of or the full breadth of its use cases. The new Storm's Path could generate the same rage as Eye/Block and keep the debuff and it would be far more powerful. Would you spam it? No, because that's not the point. You'd measure your usage of it just like you should have been doing for all of 3.x.
That's really fun to read all those complains about how WAR is changed.
During HW, there was numerous threads complaining how WAR was the definitive superior tank, and each time, a profesional tank player came to enlighten us about the real balance.
"WAR has Storm's Path giving is the best raid mitigation
- Well, you know, in real content, Path is not that important
- And with Inner Beast, he can have the highest uptime on mitigation cooldown
- But, using Inner Beast means not using Fell Cleave and everybody knows that WAR should focus on Fell Cleave for max DPS"
Well...here you go, welcome to the Fell Cleave spam machine which has its not so important skills reworked like Yoshi-P intented :p